Okuhepa: Our Friend Uranium

Looking back to November 2015:

Our Peace Corps cross-cultural training warned us about humor -- use it, for sure, but take a cautious, wait-and-see attitude at first. That is, of course, true all over the world. The Japanese take business cards very seriously. The English aren't, typically, crazy for slapstick. A German friend assures me her people have trouble with sarcasm. Still, I was surprised when my PC boss, Linda, took me very seriously when I joked about getting radiation poisoning in my desert home. It took months to reassure her. The PC medical officer just laughed and said, "I'll read up, just in case."

Anyway, I'm not at all worried about radiation poisoning, despite the half-dozen or so uranimum mines in my area, all of which I believe are 'open-pit' and some quite enormous. The uranium is very low-grade here, and widely dispersed. They have to blow up a huge amount of rock, crush it, wash it, pulverize it, treat it with deadly chemicals, and so on just to get a barrel of yellowcake. So there's probably no more radiation in my hometown than there is in yours.

And not a whole heck of a lot more when we go off to tour a uranium mine!

Rössing Uranium Limited, which is largely owned by Rio Tinto and less largely by the Iranian Foreign Investment Company and a few smaller shareholders, has been blasting uranium from the Namib Desert since 1976. The company offers public tours on the first Friday of every month, for a small fee that supports the Swakopmund Museum. I went in November 2015.

They loaded everyone into a company bus in Swakop and drove out to the mine about 70km away. At the company's communications building they showed us a couple of short videos about mining generally and the Rössing mine specifically. Then it was back onto the bus and a few more kilometers south to the mine itself. At the entrance, we stopped and everyone got a breathalyzer test! If you didn't pass it, you had to get off the bus and wait at the the guard building until all the sober tourists got back! Everyone passed, though, so we drove through the gates and around and about the mine. Here's some of what we saw:

Having passed my breathalyzer test at 10:00am on a work day, I am

no longer of interest to the security guard testing us.

Ammonia is just one of the dangerous chemicals in use at the mine.

Past the total strangers' heads, through the bus window, you can see the big

pipes through which the crushed rock travels on its journey to yellowcake-dom.

I think this rock is mostly granite. But I'm not clear on the differences
between granite, gneiss and schist.

We exited the bus at a scenic viewpoint above the pit, milling about and gazing over the safety railings.
The world's longest-running open-pit uranium mines is also one of the largest; it's 390 meters deep, so you could stick the
Empire State Building (102 stories) in there, and just the spiky thing on top would stick out of the pit.